A series of paintings chronicles the journey of African Americans who, like the artist's family, left the rural South in the early twentieth century to find a better life in the industrial North.

The views of the controversial abolitionist John Brown and the events leading up to his ill-fated attack on the arsenal at Harpers Ferry are described through the eyes of Brown's daughter, Annie.

In the mid-1950s, as Brown v. Board of Education felled the ideology of "separate but equal," the great African-American artist Jacob Lawrence saw the need for a version of American history that reckoned with its complexities and contradictions yet was shared by all its citizens. The result was his monumental work Struggle: from the History of the American People. Lawrence, the best known black American artist of the 20th century, developed the series...